Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It's no use pretending otherwise and telling us ... that educated people are the nation's most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.
-- Dušan "Charles" Simić (9 May 1938 - 9 January 2023), Serbian-American poet, 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, and poet laureate of the United States from 2007 to 2008, "Age of Ignorance" New York Review of Books, 20 March 2012
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